On Wed, 12 Aug 2020 at 15:29, Bjarne Stroustrup via Liaison
<liaison_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> > This is not the question, but it may explain a different
> > view on the importance of this change.
>
> Possibly, but to me, "several people I talked to liked it" doesn't sound
> like a solid argument for a change being important. That would be true
> for both C and C++. I am still wondering how people could ever consider
> this particular change sufficiently important to be worthwhile. Is there
> a design rationale that I can consult?
>
> Not all people in the C++ committee appreciate C/C++ compatibility, but
> I think that most do, and I do. I'm all for C/C++ compatibility, but it
> should be a two-way street. When considering changes to C++, the
> implications to C are considered, typically by people with deep and
> long-term knowledge of C, incl. people who write C compilers.

Allowing labels before declarations in C seems fine, that's a
compatibility fix that C can make to be
more compatible with C++. Introducing the allowance of labels at the
end of a compound statement to C
and then complaining that C++ is not compatible seems a bit rich,
because it doesn't seem like the
cost/benefit ratio of that change in C is all that great.

Having said that, disallowing such labels seems.. ..draconian. It
seems to be almost a "you diagnose this
as a label at the end of a compound statement, so perhaps just drop
the diagnostic and accept the program?".

I don't see this change as anything really sinister or having wide
impact, modulo implementation churn;
it seems to be a miniature usability improvement. At the end of it, it becomes
a question of whether it's worth doing when everybody can just add the
null statements where required, and it's
not hard to find why and how to do that.